About Me

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Thoughts on ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK by Piper Kerman

I
have just reread ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK: MY YEAR IN A WOMEN'S PRISON
by Piper Kerman, published in 2011. This is a memoir about exactly what
the subtitle says: a year spent in prison by Piper due to a drug-related
conviction. Piper's
memoir is note-worthy because she not only tells her story but also
reflects on the larger social implications of the ways that prisons and
the criminal justice system function.

PIPER'S STORY

Piper
grew up in the northeast, graduated from Smith, and fulfilled her
parents' expectations for someone of her social class. After college
graduation, Piper was ready for some less conventional adventures. She
became friends with a woman in her thirties who was involved in
international drug trafficking. Piper traveled around the world with
this woman and even on one occasion transported drug money (though not
drugs themselves) across international borders.

After
this money-transporting adventure, Piper realized that she needed to
extricate herself from this dangerous friendship. She moved to the West
Coast, got a job, developed a circle of good friends, and found a steady
boyfriend, with whom she eventually moved to New York when he took a
position with a magazine there. Soon, Piper's boyfriend (Larry Smith)
became her fiancé.

Five
years had passed since Piper's drug-related transgression. She had put
all drug-related involvement behind her, she was now an upstanding
contributing member of society, she was looking forward to marriage with
Larry - and one day federal marshals came knocking on her door to tell
her that she was being indicted for drug-related criminal activity.
Piper had to break the news to Larry, to her parents, and to her friends
that she would probably go to prison.

Because
Piper had the means to hire a top-notch attorney, she was able to plead
guilty in exchange for a light sentence of 15 months, of which she
served 13 months and was released early on good behavior. Piper served
her time at the minimum security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

PIPER'S LIFE IN PRISON

Piper
found prison life to be restrictive, humiliating, and sometimes
terrifying. The prisoners had to stand at attention to be counted
several times during the day and night. To receive visitors, prisoners
had to submit to strip searches. And it was always clear that the guards
had absolute power, including the power to deprive a prisoner of
privileges, to take away a prisoner's good time earned, and to cast a
prisoner into solitary confinement.

At
the same time, the women in this minimum security prison supported each
other. Some women were untrustworthy, but many showed kindness. When a
new prisoner arrived, the experienced prisoners offered words of
encouragement and helped the new arrival by supplying personal items
until the new woman's paperwork went through and she could buy items
herself from the prison commissary. Piper actually felt that she
developed a circle of friends in prison.

The
women imprisoned with Piper included a woman whom Piper calls Yoga
Janet, who was calm and centered and who taught yoga classes for the
other prisoners, as well as a Catholic nun named Sister Ardeth Platte,
who was in prison for civil disobedience to protest the United States'
military build-up.

SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Piper
looks squarely at the social implications of the war on drugs, which
took off in earnest in the 1980s, when mandatory minimum prison
sentences were put in place. This mandatory sentencing means that judges
are not allowed to use their discretion in sentencing but must impose
at least the mandatory minimum sentence.

As
a result, record numbers of people are now imprisoned with long
sentences due to tangential involvement with drug-related activity.
Piper encountered a woman in her seventies from the Dominican Republic
serving a four-year sentence for passing on drug-related telephone
messages for a male relative. Some of the women in prison with Piper
were doing sentences of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years for
non-violent offenses. If these women had children (and many did), those children were growing up without their mothers.

Piper
also says that what made her realize the full implications of the harm
she had done with her drug-related activity was to see the results of
drug addiction in the ravaged lives of her fellow inmates. Piper
realized that, in transporting drug money across international borders,
she had been supporting drug addiction - and in prison she was
confronted with the human cost of such drug addiction. The money she had
transported came from the sale of drugs that ultimately went to
addicts, who suffered greatly from their addiction and caused their
families great suffering.

Piper
believes, therefore, that the most effective deterrent to crime is to
have the criminal confront the human consequences of his or her criminal
activity. (This won't work with a sociopath, of course, but it will
work with many criminals who simply haven't considered the harm they
have done to others by their criminal actions.) Piper sees restorative
justice as the way to go - having a criminal confront the suffering
caused by his or her crimes and then make restitution.

Piper
also saw the huge need for programs to prepare prisoners for the
outside world before releasing them. Prison life, Piper says, teaches
people how to survive in prison but does nothing to prepare them to live
on the outside, where a whole different skill set is necessary. Piper
saw the deep anxiety in fellow prisoners with a release date coming up.
Some women had nowhere to go and no one to go to. These women were
preparing to check in at the nearest homeless shelter. It is very hard
to see how these women could be expected to find work and become
contributing members of society when all they could hope for upon
release was to get into a homeless shelter.

OVERALL

Piper
Kerman is a woman of strong determination who was able to go beyond
survival in prison by learning to enjoy small pleasures, by giving and
receiving support with her fellow prisoners, by closely observing and
analyzing the interactions of prison, and of course by receiving the
love and support of her family and friends and by having the means to
hire a top-notch attorney. Piper is very aware that her upbringing and
social class gave her privileges that many other prisoners lacked. For
example, Piper had no worries about post-prison employment. A friend had
created a position for her in his company that she could move into
immediately upon release; the position also came with full health
insurance benefits.

Piper's
memoir reminds us of the plight of women prisoners, especially those
serving long sentences for non-violent offenses. Piper highlights the
harm done by separating women from their children and tearing families
apart and the uselessness of long mandatory prison sentences for
tangential drug-related offenses.